Table of Contents

It's all automatic

By default XBian will automatically discover and mount USB hard disks.
When you plug them in they appear in the SCSI subsystem so the names of the various drive devices will be /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc., depending on the order in which they are connected.

Xbian will automatically mount the partitions found on these drives in subdirectories created in the /media directory. The actual name will depend on whether you have a UUID on the drive, etc. The names could be:

Whenever the disk is plugged in and automatically mounted your files will appear in the symlink location. You can even create multiple symlinks to the same disk or to subdirectories of your disk.

Hard way: fstab

You can add an entry to the /etc/fstab file to set a permanent mount point, replacing the default /media location. This file gives the list of filesystems to mount at startup or when you type the mount -a command.
You can add a new line in it (using nano or your favorite command-line editor after becoming root with sudo -s). When you do this you should specify the disk device to mount using its UUID and not the current drive letter (e.g. /dev/sda) because it could change when you unplug/replug it.
The easiest is to copy the corresponding line from the mount output (see above) and replace the current drive device by UUID=<your-uuid>.
For example for an ext4-formatted USD drive to be mounted on /home/xbian/downloads could be added like this (use your own UUID of course!):

After adding this line you should save the file and use mount -a to test it. You can unmount a currently mounted drive using umount (e.g. umount /dev/sda), just make sure you are not currently in the mounted directory.

Important: if you add an entry in /etc/fstab XBian will sometimes not boot if the disk is missing. You can add the noauto options in your fstab line to avoid this: